Teacher housing helps educators stay put amid Silicon Valley boom

Middle School teachers Reyna Jones and Raquel Arcinas Clark laugh as they grill on Clark’s porch in Santa Clara.

Middle School teachers Reyna Jones and Raquel Arcinas Clark laugh...

Teaching is a family tradition for Reyna Jones. Her parents were teachers in the South Bay, saving enough money to buy a home in Campbell. Her grandmother was a teacher in East Palo Alto. Jones has continued the tradition, teaching special education students at Cabrillo Middle School in Santa Clara.

But while her family members were able to afford a middle-class lifestyle on teachers’ salaries, Jones, a single mother, lives paycheck to paycheck.

“Even if I were married, I don’t think I could replicate the same type of situation I grew up in,” she said. “I will never be able to afford to buy anything in this area.”

Like Jones, many teachers in Silicon Valley are experiencing the economic pressures of living in boom towns. Rents and home prices have soared, forcing some at Santa Clara Unified to move as far away as Stockton, Lathrop and Los Banos in the Central Valley, where housing is still affordable. This despite the district paying relatively well compared with others in the state.

Middle school teacher Reyna Jones watches television at her home in Santa Clara.

Middle school teacher Reyna Jones watches television at her home in Santa Clara.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

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Middle School teacher Reyna Jones answers emails on her computer in her living room in Santa Clara, California, on Wednesday, May 11, 2016.

Middle School teacher Reyna Jones answers emails on her computer in her living room in Santa Clara, California, on Wednesday, May 11, 2016.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

Teacher housing helps educators stay put amid Silicon Valley boom

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In an attempt to retain teachers, Santa Clara Unified provides 70 units of subsidized housing in an apartment complex called Casa del Maestro, or House of Teachers. The project, California’s first subsidized teacher housing site, was developed on a former school site in 2002 and expanded in 2009. Today, a growing number of school districts — particularly in the pricey Bay Area — are considering similar endeavors to try to curb teacher turnover.

Other districts follow lead

San Francisco Unified is planning a 100-unit housing complex for public school teachers and paraprofessionals, which it hopes to open by 2020. Cupertino Union is considering building 200 affordable housing units on a vacant piece of district land. And Newark Unified is considering underutilized property it owns for a potential housing site.

San Mateo County Community College and Los Angeles Unified School District are among a handful of other districts across the country that already offer housing for educators.

“Teacher housing is an additional tool to recruit people,” said Dominic Dutra, a Bay Area real estate developer who helps school districts plan and build teacher housing. “School districts have all of this underutilized land, and here’s a policy that helps them be competitive.”

Jones landed a spot in Casa del Maestro in 2014, a year after taking a job at Cabrillo. Her apartment has two bedrooms — one for her, one for her 17-year-old son — two bathrooms, a walk-in closet and a porch. At $1,705 per month, rent eats up about 30 percent of her $70,000 salary. If she lived in market-rate housing, Jones would have to spend nearly half of her income on a two-bedroom apartment, according to the most recent estimates from real estate rental site Zumper.

“They’re throwing high-rises up all over, but we can’t afford to live there, they cost $3,500 to $4,000 a month,” she said. “We work hard, and we should have a place we can go home to that’s nice instead of living in some dump.”

As Silicon Valley becomes economically inhospitable for teachers, some are moving to less expensive parts of the state. Santa Clara Unified anticipates about 7 percent of its teaching staff will resign after the school year. While the district doesn’t track why teachers leave, there’s wide agreement that the region’s high cost of living is a major factor.

District officials worry it will get harder and harder to fill the vacant positions because of a statewide teacher shortage.

Last year, the statewide educator portal EdJoin listed more than 42,700 open teaching jobs in California, a figure more than 60 percent higher than 2013’s count, according to a recent report from the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization focused on elementary and secondary education.

Santa Clara County saw a 56 percent increase in vacant teaching jobs over the time period.

Several factors, including people leaving the profession, are fueling the shortfall. Layoffs during the recession, paired with retirements of Baby Boomers, caused many schools to trim staff dramatically during the late 2000s. Some districts are trying to bring staffing back to pre-recession levels, but the number of people receiving credentials in California has been declining for years because of waning interest in the profession.

“At this point, the teacher shortage is starting to become serious,” said Patrick Shields, who co-wrote the Learning Policy Institute report. Shields added that California experienced a similar shortfall in the late 1990s, and it took a wide array of programs to stabilize the teaching force. “There has to be a multifaceted approach to the problem now as well.”

Effects of turnover

In places like the Bay Area, many policy experts believe, the region’s high cost of living is closely linked to teacher turnover.

First-year teachers in San Francisco need to spend about three-fourths of their earnings on a median-priced one-bedroom apartment, according to rental estimates from Zumper. Rent would eat up 42 percent of the highest-paid starting teacher’s salary at Santa Clara Unified.

The effects of teacher turnover have widespread impacts, particularly in hard-to-staff fields like special education, math and science.

“When teachers reach three, five, seven years, they have certain skill sets under their belt, they’ve grown up through the district so to speak,” said Andrew Lucia, the district’s assistant superintendent of human resources. “If they’re not able to stay, we lose that investment, which (hurts) students.”

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

Middle school teacher Reyna Jones (second from right) chats with colleague Jeannie Ambrose (right) after a school counsel meeting at Cabrillo Middle School.

Middle school teacher Reyna Jones (second from right) chats with...

The state Legislature is considering a package of bills aimed at recruiting and retaining teachers. Two directly tackle the difficulty some have securing housing.

AB2200, introduced by Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond, proposes transferring $100 million to a newly created branch of the California Housing Finance Agency, which would be used to help build affordable housing for teachers.

‘One part of the solution’

SB1413, introduced this year by state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, would make it easier for school districts to leverage federal, state and local funds to develop housing for teachers. The bill passed the Senate’s Transportation and Housing Committee in April, and Leno hopes it will land on the governor’s desk by late summer.

“The bill will be one part of the solution in enabling teachers to live in the communities where they teach,” Leno said. “This crisis affects the Bay Area probably more than any other part of the state, potentially more than any other part of the country, so we have to be as creative as possible in coming up with solutions.”

The state Legislative Analyst’s Office, however, released a report last month suggesting that market forces will correct California’s teacher shortage, and it encouraged the Legislature to avoid implementing broad policies.

The office recommended recruiting teachers from parts of the country with a surplus — New York, for example, produces far more teachers than it can hire, according to the report — and to try to bring retired teachers in high-need areas back into the classroom.

Casa del Maestro alleviates some of the financial pressure teachers in Silicon Valley face. One and two-bedroom units in the apartment complex, a stone’s throw away from the huge Apple campus under construction, go for between $1,110 and $1,805 per-month — well below market rate. The proximity to schools in the district cuts down on transportation costs.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

Middle school teacher Reyna Jones walks up the stairs of her apartment complex.

Middle school teacher Reyna Jones walks up the stairs of her...

The handful of cities that have built similar complexes are seeing positive effects on teacher recruitment and retention. A 2013 survey of teachers in coastal Dare County, N.C., which has 36 subsidized apartment units for teachers, found that affordable housing was the biggest factor in teachers’ desire to continue working in the region.

The cost of living in the touristy beach community surpasses most other neighboring counties.

“The housing has helped us staff positions that are difficult to fill,” said Elisabeth Silverthorne, executive director of the Dare Education Foundation, which partnered with a statewide credit union to build the complex. “At one point, we had almost an entire foreign language program living there, and those are teachers that are hard to hire in this area.”

Feeling sense of community

For Raquel Arcinas Clark, a special education teacher at Cabrillo Middle School in Santa Clara, Casa del Maestro also provides a sense of community.

“I have the freedom here to be myself and not worry about getting broken into, or about money so much,” she said. “Everyone around you is a teacher, so we all know each other and look out for each other.”

Arcinas Clark lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her husband, Steven. Pictures of her family in the Philippines adorn the refrigerator, personal paintings hang on the walls, and a large garage allows Steven Clark, a machinist, to enjoy his hobby of fixing cars and motorcycles.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

Middle school teacher Reyna Jones walks into her garage as she heads to a school counsel meeting.

Middle school teacher Reyna Jones walks into her garage as she...

The couple have lived there for five years, which means they’re beginning to look for a new home — the complex has a seven-year residency limit.

The school district had a mortgage-assistance program for people leaving Casa del Maestro, but the program has been discontinued because of funding shortages, according to district spokeswoman Jennifer Dericco. Even if that financial help still existed, Steven Clark doubts they would find a home in their price range.

“Nothing is under $1 million nearby, and if it is, it’s a serious fixer-upper,” he said. “We couldn’t even afford the taxes on that.”

Demand surpasses supply

Arcinas Clark thinks the subsidized apartments should be open to teachers indefinitely, but the supply of units doesn’t meet demand. There’s a 30-person wait list to get into Casa del Maestro, and openings are rare, Dericco said. And as Santa Clara Unified grows alongside the region’s population — four new schools are scheduled to open by 2019 — competition for the units will most likely get tougher.

The district would like to build additional teacher housing, but all of its vacant land will be used for new school construction, Dericco said.

“Casa del Maestro has helped, but it’s not sufficient. We have close to 900 certified members, and only 70 units there,” said Michael Hickey, president of Santa Clara Unified’s teacher union. “The main way to keep teachers and have them live in Silicon Valley is to increase pay.”

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

Teacher Reyna Jones (right) walks out of Cabrillo Middle School with colleague Jeannie Ambrose (left) after a school counsel meeting in Santa Clara.

Teacher Reyna Jones (right) walks out of Cabrillo Middle School...

If the Clarks can’t find anything affordable in Silicon Valley, they may have to leave the district. The couple already are looking at Tracy and the Anderson Valley as potential new homes. While the pay for teachers with 10 years of experience is tens of thousands of dollars less in both areas, the lower salaries could be offset by a lower cost of living.

The median sale price for a home in Silicon Valley was $830,000 last year, more than double the median sale price in California as a whole, according to a recent report by Joint Ventures Silicon Valley, an economic think tank.

“I’m worried because after next year, I don’t know where I’ll be,” Arcinas Clark said. “We really like the teacher apartments, but once the seven years are over, there’s a chance the district may lose some very good teachers.”